The Slopeside Shag

I've been planning weddings for fourteen years, and if there's one thing it's made me an expert at, it's spotting couples who are going to crash and burn. I can see it from across a reception hall. The groom who checks his phone during the first dance. The bride who laughs a little too loud at everything her mother says. The best man who stands too close to the maid of honor even though he came with a plus one. It's a gift, honestly, and it pays my mortgage.

But nobody warns you about this. When you spend all year reading other people's love stories, you kind of stop believing in your own. I'm 42, I live alone with a cat named Gus who barely tolerates me, and my last actual date was fourteen months ago with a guy who talked about his fantasy football league for two hours. Two hours! I sat there doing my little mental analysis of him and by dessert I had him down as a crash and burn before we even burned.

So when the spring season wound down and I had a long weekend with nothing on the calendar, I booked myself a solo trip to Silverbell Ridge. End of season, slushy runs, half-empty lodges, cheap rooms. Perfect. I told everybody it was for the skiing, which was a lie, because I'm a mediocre skier at best. It was really for the sitting. Sitting somewhere pretty with a drink, not planning anybody's seating chart.

The mountain at the end of April is a funny place. Snow in the morning that turns to mush by noon, everybody skiing in goggles and t-shirts, the whole town giving off this end-of-term energy. Like everybody knows the party's almost over so nobody's trying very hard. I liked it immediately.

My first night there I wandered over to The Loft, which is this converted barn that serves as the bar and grill and basically the whole social scene for that end of the ridge. Wide deck looking out at the mountain, string lights, the works. It was maybe a third full. Spring crowds, right? I grabbed a stool at the bar and ordered a glass of something red and started doing what I always do, which is people-watch and quietly sort everybody into categories.

And that's when I heard my name.

"Stacey? Stacey Wakefield, is that you?"

I turned around and there was Rana, who I used to work with back when I was an assistant at a big event company in Denver. We hadn't seen each other in maybe six years but she came barreling over like it was last Tuesday. She was the same as ever, big smile, big earrings, a glass of white wine in one hand.

"Oh my god, look at you!" she said, hugging me with the wine glass held way out to the side so she didn't spill it on me. "What are the odds? What are you doing here?"

"Just a little solo weekend," I said. "Recharge the batteries. You?"

"Gideon and I come up every spring for closing weekend! He's an instructor here." She grabbed my elbow and towed me toward the bar. "You have to meet him, he's my friend from college, you'd remember him, he was at my thirtieth, the tall one!"

Honestly I vaguely remembered a tall guy at Rana's birthday party who'd done an impression of the DJ that had everybody crying. That was the extent of it. She steered me to a high-top near the window and there he was, and I'll admit my first thought was, well, hello.

Gideon Beaumont was 44, which I found out later, and he had that ski instructor look, tan lines, easy posture, the kind of grin that comes from spending twenty years telling beginners they're doing great when they absolutely are not. Silver hair coming in at the temples. Forearms, honestly. A wedding planner notices forearms, we see a lot of rolled-up sleeves.

"Stacey, this is Gideon. Gideon, Stacey, we planned a hundred weddings together back in the day."

"Weddings, huh," he said, shaking my hand. His grip was warm. "So you're the enemy."

"How am I the enemy?"

"Because every wedding is a funeral for a bachelor party's lifestyle. That's what I tell my grooms."

"Oh, that's rich," I said, sitting down. "The guy who teaches rich tourists how to fall down a hill for money is calling my industry fake."

Rana laughed and went off to get another round, which I should have clocked as a setup, because Rana absolutely used to set people up for a living back when we planned events together. Some things don't change.

So Gideon and I got to talking, and he was easy to talk to, which annoyed me a little because I'd come here specifically to not flirt with anybody. We argued about whether skiing or wedding planning was the harder job, and then somehow we got onto the thing I actually know about, which is reading people.

"See, I do it too," he said, leaning back with his beer. "Twenty years of reading beginners. I can tell within one run whether somebody's going to be terrified all day or turn into a hero by lunch."

"You cannot."

"Can too. Body language doesn't lie. You lean, you look, you breathe, it all tells on you."

"Okay, hotshot," I said. "Read me."

He looked at me for a second, and I mean actually looked, and I felt it, which was annoying. "Left-handed but right-eyed," he said. "You check exits when you sit down. You're on your second glass but you're pacing yourself, so you've got a plan for tomorrow morning. And you were people-watching the whole bar before Rana called your name, sorting us. I'd bet money on it."

That shut me up for about four seconds. Because he was dead right on all three counts and I did not love that.

"Beginner's luck," I said. "You've got a fifty percent shot on anything and you just listed generic stuff."

"Oh, we're doing this?" He was grinning now, the full grin, the one that probably closes sales on ski lessons. "Fine. You're a professional, I'm a professional. Let's make it interesting."

Rana came back with the drinks right then, and bless her, she slid a basket of fries onto the table between us, because The Loft does these big shared baskets and she'd apparently ordered for the table. Gideon pointed at the basket like it was a prop he'd requested.

"Here. Bet. One of us makes the other reach for the last fry first. Loser buys the next round."

"You're on," I said, because it was silly and he was cute and I hadn't done silly in a long time.

But then he had to go and escalate it, didn't he. He stirred the fries around, picked out the two biggest ones and set them apart, and said, "Best two out of three. And after the fries, we raise the stakes. Same game, bigger question."

"Bigger question like what?"

"Like which of us can read the other one all the way down," he said. "Who cracks first. Whoever calls it right gets to decide how the rest of the night goes."

I should have laughed that off. A smarter woman would have laughed that off. But like I said, I'd spent a whole season watching other people get swept up in things, and there's only so much watching a person can do before something in her goes, well, why not me for once?

"Fries first," I said. "Then we'll see who's actually the professional here."

He took one of the big fries, bit off the end of it, and set the rest down in front of him like bait. I did the same with mine. Rana was watching us over the rim of her wine glass with the smuggest expression I have ever seen on a human face.

"You two are ridiculous," she said.

"We're professionals," Gideon said.

And here's the part where I have to be honest with myself, which I usually am, since self-delusion is basically the one thing my job has trained out of me. I clocked the fry game for what it was inside about a minute. It wasn't about fries. He was watching how I sat, how I held my glass, where my eyes went, and I was doing the exact same thing to him, and somewhere in all that watching the game stopped being a game. His knee was maybe four inches from mine under the table. Neither of us moved it. That was data too, and we both knew it.

Rana left around nine, hugging us both and muttering something about an early lesson, and I swear she winked at me, which made me want to die a little. Then it was just the two of us and a basket with three fries left in it, and Gideon pushed the basket an inch toward me.

"Ladies first," he said.

"Oh no you don't. That's not hospitality, that's a trap."

"Is it working?"

I looked at him and he looked at me and I thought, okay, Wakefield, you've read a thousand grooms on their wedding days. You know exactly what that face means. The only question was whether I was going to let him win the fry or make him work for it.

I picked up my wine instead and took a slow, deliberate sip.

"Nice try," I said.

His eyebrows went up, and I could tell he was recalculating everything, and honestly? Best feeling I'd had in fourteen months.

He tipped his head back and laughed, a real one, none of that polite bar noise. "Okay. Okay! You're good. New game, then. Since you're refusing the fry like it owes you money."

"New game, same wager?"

"Same wager, higher stakes. Whoever blushes first buys the next bottle of wine." He leaned back and crossed his arms like he'd just laid down a royal flush. "And I mean a real blush. Neck up. Rana can be the judge."

"Rana left, Gideon."

"Then we'll be our own judges. Honor system."

I snorted into my wine. "The honor system. Between two strangers playing psychological warfare over french fries. That'll hold up great."

"We're not strangers, though, are we? I've heard about you. Dani's wedding, two summers ago. You're the one who talked the caterer out of quitting mid-reception."

Oh, that was dirty. That was genuinely dirty, because it worked. I felt heat start at my collarbones and had to physically fight it down, which of course he noticed, because noticing is his entire personality apparently. "That was crowd management," I said. "Not a favor. The caterer was being dramatic."

"You're blushing."

"I am not. It's warm in here."